Posted
by
Roblimo
on Monday May 19, 2014 @03:50PM
from the to-learn-how-badly-linux-sucks,-you-need-to-use-it-for-at-least-five-years dept.

How do we know Linux sucks? Because Bryan Lunduke says so. How did he become a Linux authority? By using Linux, of course. He has also written a kids Linux book, Linux for Hank, and a grown-up Linux book, Linux is Badass. But wait! That's not all! Bryan is also one of the people behind the infamous Bad Voltage podcast.

And now, for something slightly different: In moments of weakness, Bryan admits that maybe Linux suckage isn't total, and Linux may have a good point or two and maybe some of the suckage could be removed. Zounds! Is that possible? Watch our video chat with Bryan (and/or read the transcript) and see. Or watch the entire 44 minute speech he gave at the 2014 LinuxFest Northwest, which was the 5th (or maybe 6th) "Linux Sucks" speech he's given at LFNW. That makes this a tradition, not just a speech. So if you find yourself in or near Bellingham, Washington, in 2039 you might want to pop in and see if Bryan is still updating his "Linux Sucks" speech. He'll be the geezer hobbling to the front of the room with help from his AutoCane, a device sure to be developed between now and then -- which will no doubt run Linux. (Alternate video link)

Timothy: So Bryan, you have been saying for a long time and
here at LinuxFest Northwest among other places: “Linux Sucks.”

Bryan: Yeah, it sucks. It is terrible.

Timothy: And you said that as someone who loves Linux. So
let’s talk about why you came to have this negative attitude.

Bryan: It is not a negative attitude, man. It is just a
realistic attitude. It is like if you go out and you buy a car and
you are like: This is my Prius, man. This is a Prius. It is a hybrid
fusion whatever drive and that’s awesome, right? Because you
get mega good mileage and it has all these great things about it. But
it is also kind of a douche mobile and you have to understand that it
sucks even though it is awesome. Everything’s got its pluses
and minuses, even things that you love. I love Linux, I have made my
whole life around Linux. I work for Linux companies. I write for
Linux magazines, but it really blows.

Timothy: Now, you seem to have some especially harsh words
this year for a few of the big name companies, what are the worst
things, what makes Linux suck in 2014 that really shouldn’t be
true?

Bryan: You know, the big things for me, there is two big
things: First, there is a pervasive culture within the Linux world of
needless, senseless fortuitous forking that makes a man a little bit
grumpy. My favorite example is the current one, is the OpenSSL
problems. We have OpenSSL that the whole internet requires to do
anything, one little heart bleeding problem happens everyone loses
their bananas and someone decides to fork OpenSSL and make LibreSSL.
Which makes absolutely no sense, because now you have two incredibly
important security libraries out there that you have to maintain,
which basically means you are twice as likely, that’s just a
random made-up statistic, but twice as likely to have problems like
what we just experienced. But yet, it is part of our culture. So we
just do it. We fork things. We don’t like it a little bit, we
fork it. We don’t like GNOME? Let’s fork it, and make
something that’s 99.9% identical to GNOME. So that’s a
little bit annoying. The other big thing for me right now is the
attitude of certain companies that shall not be named, that just like
to kind of maverickally go their own thing. You know, they just
decide, “I don’t like any desktop environment”, “I
don’t like any desktop compositing window manager”, “I
don’t like anything”, “I am going to rewrite it all
from scratch, and all you guys can go to hell”. Okay they don’t
actually say that. But that’s how a lot of us feel. So that’s
the other thing that kind of gets my goat lately. There are lots of
other little problem, but those are the two. Those are the ones.

Timothy: Now, let’s say relative suckiness.

Bryan: Relative levels of suckiness?

Timothy: So we are here, this is the 15th year that this
particular gathering has been going on. And in that time, we’ve
seen a lot of cool improvements and your talk, to be fair, for anyone
who hasn’t seen it yet, you aren’t entirely down on
Linux. What are the good things that have happened this year?

Bryan: Alright. So to be fair, you’re right. I’ve
been doing this thing for five or six years now. When we started
doing this, it was: “Here is all the reasons why Linux sucks.”
And it was a rapid fire list of everything that was broken. And we
started it, Wi-Fi drivers, to video drivers, everything. Now to be
fair, most of those things aren’t a problem anymore. So Linux
works a whole hell of a lot better now than it did in, say, 2006. So
nowadays when I do the presentation, it is probably ‘40% Linux
Sucks’ and like ‘60% Linux Doesn’t Suck,’
because just to be fair, things have gotten a lot better. But
honestly, I would say, some of the things that are the best about
Linux right now are the exact same things that are the worst about
Linux right now. Pervasive forking and people doing absolutely crazy
stuff despite what the community thinks. I like that someone came
along and said, “OpenSSL? Screw that! I want to make LibreSSL.”
I like that someone had the cojones to say, “I can do this
better”

Timothy: Again people who are quite competent at auditing
code.

Bryan: Exactly. Competent people and passionate people. And in
the end, they may be wrong. They may have gone the stupid stupid
road. Or they may come up with some really awesome improvements in
LibreSSL that get brought back into OpenSSL. Or vice versa. In the
end, we are all going to end up benefiting. And like that company
that will not be named in this particular video, that tends to go
their own thing and create their own desktop environment. It’s
not one that I particularly like. But I love that they are doing it.
They are trying something new. They are blazing their own path. And
to me, that’s kind of part of what makes Linux kick ass. I
don’t want to see everyone say, “Oh well, KDE exists. So
we are fried, we’ll never improve the desktop again. We will
just sit.” We don’t want to be stagnant. We want to go
crazy. We don’t want to be Microsoft or Apple where they just
sit on their hind quarters, change the color of a couple of things
every now and then, or put web pages into little tiles and call it
good. We want to do cool interesting stuff. And that’s what
makes Linux awesome, and what makes it suck all at the same time. I
don’t see any way to actually fix that, because it is like
having the Prius. It sucks. And it’s awesome. And you have to
take both.

Timothy: It is like the leather seats if you are looking for
an automatic transmission.

Bryan: Well, you can’t get a leather seats in a Prius,
man, they are totally ruined. Animals had to die to make that Prius
you know what I am saying here. You can’t do that. But they are
nice, they may be felt seats.

Timothy: Sure.

Bryan: Yeah, right.

Timothy: In this year’s iteration of your talk, one
thing you mentioned is the amazing chat client of Elementary.

Bryan: Right. Who saw that coming?

Timothy: Does that mean that Elementary doesn’t suck as
much?

Bryan: Well, that’s the crazy thing. Elementary has
earned, has gotten over a million users or a million downloads of the
current version. They’ve had about two versions now? I think
that’s it. I think that’s all they’ve ever done.
And both of them are labeled beta I think. And yet, over a million
people have grabbed that sucker. And it looks beautiful. And they are
getting big news. And on Distrowatch, they are like number six now,
they are like above, they are above Arch, they are above Slackware,
they are above Gentoo. They are above the grand daddies of Linux. And
I think it’s amazing that a little upstart with no funding can
come along and say, “You know what? I am going to make a Linux
distro that’s basically Ubuntu but with some really kick ass
icons, and then see what happens from there.” I mean they did
more than that. But that’s how they got started. And now they
are huge. They are becoming something that could be a real force to
be reckoned with. It happened with Linux Mint. Really it happened
with Ubuntu. This is what made Ubuntu. They just came out of nowhere,
and they were like: ‘Whatever, we are brown and orange, and
that now, we have a cool distro.’ And everyone freaked out and
used it. And it is awesome. I think it is amazing because it just
shows that flash forward five or six years from now, Ubuntu is not
probably going to be dominant, Fedora is probably not going to be
dominant. The reality is it is probably going to switch and be—who
knows? Mepus and Elementary and Slackware—those will be the
predominant distros for a few years. And I love that. I think that’s
where it could go.

Timothy: What one thing would you most like to see suck less
by this time next year?

Bryan: By this time, next year? My one thing is: I would love
to be done talking about X.org. I would like to never have to mention
the big. Not that I have anything against the longstanding display of
X. it has done such a wonderful job for us. But I would very much
like to just kill off that X.org existed and say, “Okay,
Weyland has not only shipped but all the distros that are big are
using it, and we are just fine, and that’s what we are focusing
on.” I would like to cross off X.org. That would do it for me.

There's a lot of this sentiment out there, esp from europeans. It makes me wonder if europeans aren't just falling for the anti american propaganda over there in the same insipid way they claim americans fall for shit here. The fact you're advocating violence (by gun no less, which is quite ironic) as a method of social engineering suggests the european cultural attributes that drove the creation of the US in the first place are still present. How nice.

No. In the US, people are raised to to be worker bees or office drones, and most of the colleges and universities are paper mills, with the few of the good ones too loaded with left wing ideological tautologies to be of any use in teaching students how to think critically. Not caring what other people think isn't necessarily a bad thing.. Today, society is way too wrapped up in what the many are feeling (never mind thinking) such that we're paralyzed as individuals. Why should we operate society like the

You're joking, but that is actually Linux's biggest problem, and the reason it will never make any significant dent in the desktop market. Apple and MS may have a few minor variations of their OS's, but for the most part they make things pretty simple. The consumer can generally choose from two basic flavors of Windows (Home and Professional) and one flavor of Apple OS.

But when you get into Linux, you have to start by telling the consumer "Well, there really is no such thing as Linux" and explaining to them that there are hundreds of different distros to choose from, many of which are radically different from one another. This sort of incredible fracturing may be attractive to uber-hardcore geeks, but it sends the average user running as fast as they can back to Windows and Apple.

For a brief period it seemed like Ubuntu might break through this barrier and become the defacto Linux standard. But, inevitably, the Linux hipsters turned against it ("It used to be about the MUSIC, man! Now you've gone all commercial and so you suck!"). And so we're back to the fringe mess that is "Linux."

And, no, Android is NOT Linux. No one outside of a few autistic nitpickers thinks that running a heavily modified Linux kernel in an almost inaccessible undercarriage of an OS makes it "Linux." That's like saying that a 747 is a Rolls Royce just because it happens to use Rolls Royce engines.

I don't like this growing trend where people insist on creating everything as video, even things where the video doesn't actually serve any purpose other than showing a talking head. Information is so much easier to consume when you can consume it at your own pace, depending on your own speed of reading with no distracting heads and not being limited by the speed at which the video happens to progress. Text also happens to let you quickly jump over things you already are familiar with or jump back and forth between interesting passages.

I too hate when the harsh light caused by a video playing illuminates my tech dungeon, bro. I can deal with the minimal lumens from a few terminals but it's complete bullshit when someone forces me to examine the filth I wallow in while using my device.

I have no idea who inisited on it and when it became cool to have to watch a slow ass instructional video when a small write up and 10 photos will do the job 10x faster and I can scroll up and down the page or print it when I need a reference. Its so painfull just see how many vdeo tutorials where are for say Drupal.

Oh, I don't know, once in a while I come across a tutorial that really does benefit from video. Unfortunately about half of those are ruined because the creator didn't think about what he was trying to do first, and just dove straight in. These are easily spotted by constant repetitions of the phrase "I'm just gonna go right ahead and..." followed swiftly by "Okay, that didn't work, let me just..."

The ones I really hate are where you do a google search (not youtube) about how to fix a bug in a game or such, and the top hit is a looong video of a mouse interacting with windows UI where most of that time the mouse isn't moving because the video maker is talking. Even if you do that sort of thing in a video (for people who can't find menus) it would still be more informative if it just showed the screenshots with arrows pointing to what to click on and get the whole video finished in a minute. But the

Can you please video yourself reading your comment, upload to Youtube and post a reply with the URL? I read your text too fast and was jumping around in it a bit, and I really would like to adhere more to your original though process as intended. Thanks!

Every time I rant about this somewhere (except maybe here https://plus.google.com/+Micha... [google.com] ) people complain that I'm being "elitist" for wanting to read things that are basically text instead of listening to someone else do it.

Every time I rant about this somewhere (except maybe here https://plus.google.com/+Micha... [google.com] ) people complain that I'm being "elitist" for wanting to read things that are basically text instead of listening to someone else do it.

"Elitist" has become what the word "racist" has become: originally it referred to something important that should be understood and resisted. Now it just means "I have decided I don't like what you said, but I can't find any fault with it. Rather than admit my dislike of it is irrational and should be changed, I'll just call you names now."

Lots of childish people waste their energy hating reality, leading them to resent anyone who is mature enough to spend that energy looking for better ways of dealing

People like video because they don't have to actually understand what was said. They can pretend they groked the subject because they listened to a 30 minute video clip. What they are really doing is using the audio as noise distraction while they are doing something else, typically updating their Twitter or FB status that they are learning something or folding laundry.

People like to read because they want the context. They are attempting to engage their brain around the subject matter. And some just want

However here, at least, Slashdot is a little more progressive than some sites in providing a transcript.

It could also be argued that this video (in common with most that do actually make it to Slashdot, to the best of my recollection), being as it is an unrehearsed interview and not a pre-written statement, does add just a little more in terms of context, phrasing, and emphasis than can be gained from reading the transcript alone.

I don't see any helpful "sarcasm" tags in the transcript, for example. Those c

What, that a website you don't own but provides you a service free of charge gets to do things the way they want to do them? Unless you deliberately click play, it's just an image, and even that can be easily blocked if it offends you so much.

Puhlease. You may be butt-hurt but you haven't been raped. If you ever were you might find the experience surprisingly unpleasant, if this is your threshold.

It seems that the philosophy of "video >>>>> text" is particularly popular with politicians. I figured they liked it because they tend to get a little more control of the propagation of the medium (as slightly fewer people know how to rip videos from youtube than know how to use copy and paste) and because they can use it to ensure that the people the message is being delivered to are a fully captive audience.

Why exactly this guy feels that he has something to gain by posting his monologue

Contip: That still doesn't return the wasted bandwidth, nor does it give you the random access ability of a page of text. Additionally, if the subtitles are not hardcoded, jumping the video or increasing the playback speed will usually make the subtitles go away. For that matter, depending on what playback device you use, your options for increasing or reducing playback speeds tend to be very limited, especially at the higher speeds where they tend to skip over entire segments resulting in lost text. And that's not even mentioning that you need a good subtitler to keep the timing reasonable and readable, something that is rather lacking in a large number of those that do subtitles. Maybe you mean for them to hire a professional subtitler, though that would massively increase the cost. (Yes, I watch a lot of subtitled videos.)

Sorry AC, but your 'protip' doesn't work worth a damn.

Some things are better for video, some for text, and some for audio. Too bad there's a lot of idiots that think everything should be video. I'm dreading the day I find a video of some baka reading a book, magazine, or newspaper. I'm sure they exist, but fortunately I haven't been forced to view them yet.

Come on, surely on "News for Nerds" it's not going to be that hard to reach the conclusion that the subtitles are there so there's probably some way to extract them and lo, somebody (well actually there are various ones) has already created a tool to do just that [blogspot.com.au].

Doesn't help, as you can't speed up the video to let you read the text more quickly. Print it all out and let us read that, then we'll be done with that half hour video in less than 5 minutes, saving 99.9999% of the bandwidth (assuming ads are turned off).

The main reasons people do video is to get a few cents out of youtube or to feed their ego. The only time video helps is if there is some sort of demonstration.

The reason people do video is they are barely literate and can just talk into a camera. Any idiot can fumble around and try to 'show' you something on camera. Creating a coherent written document is a lot more work. People who can create good written documentation are rare. People who can ramble on in front of a camera.. not so rare.

Maybe the producer's preferences are a factor, but I believe these two are more important:

1) Google ranks videos higher and displays them more prominently in their regular web search, plus you come up in video search on Google, YouTube and possibly elsewhere.

2) Some people, for whatever reason, perceive reading as "hard", "boring", or "work", and prefer to watch videos for all their non-work information needs, even if those are just talking heads. I cannot understand it, but apparently this is a real ph

I am an AV learner too. However I am also impatient. If something can be summed up in a small paragraph then I find video to be an intolerable waste of time. Video is for intractable subjects, not random musings.

OpenSSL doesn't listen to bug reports. They don't even accept offered patches to known bugs. It's this spirit of non-cooperation that caused the forking into LibreSSL. See the 30 day prospectus [openbsd.org] (/. coverage [slashdot.org]) from the LibreSSL project lead, which details all of the problems. Brian even says forking is ultimately a benefit, and that he "loves that they're doing it."

It seems to be that his definition of "sucks" is "has room for improvement"... Everything has room for improvement, so apparently everything sucks.

The point is we need people like him to remind us that certain things suck and need to be replaced (cough, X11, cough) otherwise we ae stuck with old badly architected technology for decades.

It's hard to find somebody that says X11 doesn't suck. I am definitely not that person.

My point was that he says forking sucks, he gave an example where (unbeknownst to him?) forking was certainly the best option, then he went on to talk about how forked Linux distributions have made the world a better place. He seems to conclude that forking is great and that he "loves" it.

(Also, I misspelled his name. Sorry, Bryan. I guess my post had room for improvement... meaning it sucked.)

I've looked into Wayland, and it really does sound like X12. Grab the parts of X11 that are still used, clean them up and ship them.The real question is as you say, why exactly did it take them this long? X11 was long in the tooth by the year 2000.

...at least with Linux, we have the power to do something about it without the constant hassle of a commercial system with all its secrecy, NDAs, policy approvals and we don't have to hide the fact we screwed up in order not go get sued by every paying customer, we just FIX it...and then another bug appears, but hey...have you ever found any human to be perfect? When you bought your first house, was it perfect? I bet not.

At least with OPEN SOURCE everyone is free to chip in, that is the magic of Linux. Suspect a bug? A backdoor somewhere? If you have the knowledge, you're free to look. I've been compiling my own Kernel since the early Slackware days, and albeit I'd never recommend this system to Aunt Daphne and rather have her purchase an Apple iMac instead...Linux is all about freedom. And if you missed this point, maybe Linux isn't for you.

I rant a lot about quality problems of OSS, but admit that what you described is one of the best properties about the Linux world. It's something what keeps me hanging around. The open development process is very interesting and useful.

Linux has many positives, there is no doubt. However, there are many problems with the system. The lack of applications leads to situations where a user is told is a great OS, but there is nothing on the OS that does what they want to do. Its great to have a kernel that works well but whats the point if you cant do what you need on it because of the lack of applications. Wine has been around for 20 years yet still has yet to develop an emulation layer that can run 99% of Windows applications reliably. It constantly breaks support for older applications carelessly. The changelogs seem to be filled with obscure performance hacks that lead to a.01% improvement in performance but it appears little is happening in major progress on supporting all of the Windows API.

The bigger problem is lack of hardware support, to the point that the application issue may just be a result of the problem with it being so difficult to get new, novel, or unusual hardware to work on Linux. The fact is, hardware makers will always provide better working drivers in a timely manner than backwards engineering. Its a pipe dream to think that many hardware makers will open source the drivers. By the time open source drivers come around, the hardware is often so old its not even being sold any more or is out of date. Some hardware has no drivers available.

This problem stems from the attitude of the Linux kernel developers. Many of the Linux community have an absolute aversion to actually working with hardware manufacturers to get hardware support implemented, especially with Dell. With Microsoft repetedly throwing Dell and other manufacturers under the bus, there was an opportunity to reach out to Dell to look at Linux as an alternative. This option has been thrown away by Linux. Linux could have gotten much wider adoption by accepting the users using small amount of binary code, which wouldnt even be required to be used as open source drivers would still be developed. Part of the problem as well is the badly documented or not documented at all kernel driver interfaces. It is actually almost impossible to find any comprehensive reference on kernel internals and the driver interfaces. Driver interfaces which seem to change with each kernel version as well, blowing up hardware support for users in the process. Backward compatability is critical throughout the system. Users need to be able to be assured they can use applications and driver accross kernel versions. I have suggested before a driver compatability layer for binary drivers so they will work between kernel versions.

Another problem is the bone headedness of Canonical and Gnome who have copied every disasterous mistake and disaster of Windows 8 in creating user interfaces that are incomprehensible. The fact is, for users, an interface that is well known and practical rather than some hair brained scheme concocted by some crackhead who thinks they know better than everyone else and wants to ram their self righteous idea of user interface design on users, as with Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3. Just stick with the tried and true taskbar start menu paradigm, please. These people are actually worse than the kernel developers because they think that they are genuises with user interface design but are self absorbed, obsessed and arrogant with trying their insane user interface experiments without any sense of practicality or really caring about users at all. The user interfaces they create are vastly worse than what the kernel developers would come up with.

The linux kernel devs had an offer open to manufacturers to write drivers for free [slashdot.org]. But I guess it's been 7 years since that offer so maybe that's changed. If so it was most likely because the manufacturers didn't take them up on the offer.

The rot goes deeper than the interface. It goes down to DBus and Systemctl..... NetworkManager????? good fucking grief. I've seen an article suggesting it's a RedHat NSA conscription to control the kernel and make sure that all the major distros and almost any way you run Linux you're going to have their hooks in your system (yes in selinux, and even if you disable it, it's still there; do you *know* there are no back doors?)

It's easy to say "just accept a small amount of binary code" when you're not the one who has to debug the whole system looking for errant code. Also, when the kernel is ported, the binaries cannot be transported over to the new arch. The real truth is that binary only distribution doesn't really protect your code from someone who really wants to know how it works ( the plethora of cracks out there show this), nevermind any potential competitors who have the money to throw at people to figure it out for th

Applications: Typical GNU/Linux distributions provide at least 10,000 packages. It's ridiculous to claim that "there is nothing on the OS that does what they want to do". Applications might be somewhat different from their Windows equivalents, but time spent on getting familiar with them is a better investment than fiddling around with Wine.

Hardware: Only buy stuff that has been certified to work with Linux. Easy.

A typical linux distro may have 10,000 packages. This is not necessarily a plus, or a "solution" to the application problem. If there are say 80 half-assed attempts at an application which each implement perhaps 65% of what I actually want to do, I spend hours and hours just looking for an application to get my job done rather than... you know... just actually doing what I set out to use my computer for.

I'd much rather take maybe 2-3 applications for a particular job that actually fucking work properly

+10 Insightful to you, I have problems like you described all the time. And when I think that I managed to fix them, some bastard changes everything again just for the sake of changing and throws all my work down the drain.

It isn't just a lack of applications - many of those that are included in a typical desktop distro are either unstable or lacking features. I put it down to a few things:

Hobbyist developer(s) who have an itch to scratch, get the app to do what they want and then lose interest when it gets hard (not all cases - there are many talented developers out there who persist, but they don't tend to be desktop application developers

Constantly changing API(s) mean so much time is wasted re-inventing the wheel port

One thing I think he misses pointing out is the good ol' saying: The right tool for the job.

Which is probably a huge reason there's so much forking and so many different distros for Linux and all the open source software that follows it, and for that matter the reason there's more than one OS.

We want to use the right tool for the job.

I do like the general premise 'Linux Sucks', because I think it's good that Linux as a collective, a community, can look at their creation and say, "Well, it still sucks." And carries on to keep making it better every day.

Actually there is so much forking because everybody wants it Their Way. It is easier to just grab what's out there and run off with it to change on your own than to communicate and cooperate and work together.

Software could converge and improve over time and become ever closer to perfect, but instead everybody wants their chunk of code in there that they wrote to replace something they ripped out because doing so was easier than working to understand the old one.

Actually there is so much forking because everybody wants it Their Way. It is easier to just grab what's out there and run off with it to change on your own than to communicate and cooperate and work together.

Software could converge and improve over time and become ever closer to perfect, but instead everybody wants their chunk of code in there that they wrote to replace something they ripped out because doing so was easier than working to understand the old one.

I think you just described what is so awesome about open source. Don't like it? Fix it yourself, if others like your fixes, they'll incorporate them upstream, if not, then well, you still have your version that does what you want it to do.

A fork of OpenSSL which is stripping out support for VMS, Win16, and other ancient platforms by the *OpenBSD* group is making a bug more likely? It's supposed to make another Heartbleed twice as likely? This guy is completely full of shit. He has no idea what coding is, he just wants to hear himself talk. Give me 8:32 back!

Any halfwit can post their monologue to youtube. Spare me the lecture, and save me some time - post a damned transcript. If you are too cool to post your actual slides, just post the transcript of what you said.

There's a link to expand a transcript right below the video. Is that not rendering for you?

The transcript that I can expand below the video is not the transcript of the "Linux Sucks" video, it is a transcript of an interview that he gave after giving that speech. I'm trying to find a transcript of the video of his presentation, and as best I - and others - can tell, no such transcript exists. If he doesn't want to share his slide that is his own business (although I think he would make a stronger case if he did), but for him to go running around claiming to have such a brilliant argument and

back in the days of Win 98 it was loads more stable, faster, and it used all my hardware.

With XP, Microsoft got it mostly right and with 7 SP 1 they fixed it. Yeah, Vista and 8 suck, but you don't have to run those. So until Win 7 drops support I can't think of anything practical I _get_ with Linux besides a kick ass shell. I do like Bash though. But I'll run some Linux in a VM for that.

Aside from the shell, these are the things I do get with Linux that I don't with Windows, out-of-the-box.

- Virtual desktops- Compiz effects- KDE Activities- A package manager with a huge package repository- All open source libraries that just compile and work. Mingw works, but doesn't quite cut it.- No upgrade costs- No need to pay for each and every machine/VM- Better OS trust in a post-NSA world.- Ability to run the latest OS that still receives updates on the weakest hardware (with IceWM).

I stopped listening while he was talking about LibreSSL. This guy is utterly ignorant of why LibreSSL was forked (because the OpenSSL maintainers were not responsive to bug reports and were actively working around memory issue detection), of who was forking it (OpenBSD, Linux has nothing at all to do with it), and what is hoped to be accomplished by the fork.

I just can't pay attention when someone is blabbing about something he has no idea about. Sigh.

please someone explain what's funny in this ignorant nonsense. this guy has absolutely no idea of what he is talking about, and makes it evident on every single sentence. i don't even unterstand how this gets published here. is it a parody?

X breaks my shit every time I upgrade. I just spent 90 minutes tonight getting my Synaptics touchpad working again. I spent hours 2 years ago making it work. All the focus on compositing is leaving good 2D stuff in the lurch I feel. I do a lot of work remotely, and it is the devil trying to find a display manager that will work over VNC and let you choose your window manager without crashing. And then what do you use, Gnome, Unity, KDE? It's getting to where nothing works without a compositor and 3D.

Sound is a disaster. How many Linux sound systems are there? OSS, ALSA, Jack, ESound, PulseAudio, some I don't even remember. Alsa has been a disaster since it came out, from the perspective of documentation. I don't know how anyone ever wrote the first ALSA applications. They're supposed to be compatible, but they're not. If you play ALSA applications on my PulseAudio system, you get static and distortion. I went through all the fixes, and none of them work on my system. Fortunately the author of my application added PulseAudio as a natively supported output method (in addition to the OSS and ALSA that they already supported). I need to send them a thank you.

Notifications? Behavior I depended on two versions ago has been removed from the current version.

My system tray in XFCE4 is quirky. Some application icons won't appear unless I run the application as root (Hamster and redshift). Maybe that's a quirk of upgrading, but Google tells me I'm not the only one with these problems. And XFCE4 sucks less than other window managers, so it's a behavior I just live with.

Started Linux with RedHat in the mid 90's I gave up in disgust when I couldn't create the "partitions" or split up the hard drive as required. I've been doing the same for a while with Mint over many installations, this one time I let Mint select it's placement, as it's never put itself where I've suggest it to.

When Grub was my bootloader the problems really started, of all the things that doesn't have a GUI it's grub; I've complained recently that everything was GUI. Linux is a learning process to many (myself included) nothing to put on-line blind (while a firewall is available it's off and has zero settings, not even examples.

I knew Mint would claim the boot but also expected EasyBCD (NeoSmart Technologies) to fix it, as it's been very good at that.

I've always had a dual boot system, having Linux Mint available would work just fine. Yet working with Grub is no easy task. Some don't even mess with Grub they just select the drive from the BIOS when their computer starts. http://community.linuxmint.com... [linuxmint.com] this one creates two grubs - I don't see ithttp://www.howtoforge.com/dual... [howtoforge.com] Just saying many avoid Grub, in one way or the other.

I had to be at the computer when it started to select windows, or have to reboot; playing around with Mint and having to use it are two different things; EasyBCD was of no help...

So I reinstalled Win7; I had been planning to reinstall Win7 as it was showing signs that it was time. It's no big deal (normally) C:\ drive is my Win7 Drives D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L (total of three drives) are support, another OS, or storage. I just format C drive, reinstall windows, the drivers and my favorite programs; 2 hours time I can be up and running with my base system.

Now here's where I came across Microsoft messing with those who use Linux; once a MBR has been touched by Linux, Windows won't have anything to do with it, and it's a damn pain.

This time the Win7 install claimed "Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition" (a new one for me) I was able to continue on, it gave me a 100K boot partition, and Win7 partition, this screwed up my drive arrangement (my drives are named Drive_D, and so on). I formatted the drive again using Hirens boot disk 14 and Win7 install format both. This time I couldn't install Win7 at all, there's even a "FAST PUBLISH" "as-is in response to emerging issues". Support.microsoft.com/kb/2272294 claiming the partition the BOOTMGR is located must be in 4K clusters (NTFS is 4K clusters).

Searching for the problem, the accepted fix is to disconnect all drives except the one to hold Win7. I did that, no big deal as it's how I installed Mint without Grub loading Win7; and it worked, but there were problems. Win7 wasn't acting right, things weren't working as they should if at all.

So I started over, all this time the MBR seemed to be the problem but with Win7 formatting it before the install it should of been taken care of that, as well as my using Dart (Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset) http://www.microsoft.com/en-us... [microsoft.com] to repair the boot structure; specifically the "Bootrec" command. I had every reason to assumed it had been taken care of.

It was only when I specifically wrote the Win7 header to the MBR did everything start working. This was three days into the fiasco.

Until I learn Grub I'm not going there again, and Grub isn't all the friendly.

In my experience, it's Windows that doesn't play well with the MBR or provide any sort of menu system for non-Windows OS'es like the way grub does. In fact, the Windows installer is amazingly bad from a dual (or triple etc.) boot kind of way:

It won't touch a partition formatted in anything it doesn't understand (you can't even re-format it in the installer). You actually have to trick the Windows installer by using fdisk in Linux to change the partition ID to something like 7 (NTFS) and then magically the W